Wednesday, 11 April 2012

The Tawny Owl family have returned to their nest tree -- for directions, see the entry for Saturday 7 April. We had looked long and hard for them for several days, but maybe they had been home all the time. It is getting hard to see through the leaves. The male owl was, as usual, sitting on one of the four horse chestnut trees between the nest tree and the path, the second from the north.

The male Little Owl has moved a short way, to an old sweet chestnut a few yards southwest of the chestnut where the nest is: 51.50752,-0.176543 . Sunny days bring him out to sunbathe. I think that these birds, who are of Mediterranean origin, feel the cold and take advantage of any warm spots, which is why you sometimes see them in holes in walls where the sun has warmed the masonry.

Our native Tawny Owls, on the other hand, are pretty tough.

One of the Coal Tits of the family group in the Leaf Yard was carrying a bundle of dog hair to a sweet chesnut near the southwest corner of the enclosure. Another sweet chestnut, near the Speke obelisk, is home to some Treecreepers. What a boon these old broken-down trees are to hole-nesting birds. They all date from 1690, when Kensington Gardens was laid out for William and Mary, who had decided to live out of town to get away from the stink of Whitehall and its memories of the ousted Stuarts.

Several pairs of Mallards were ambling through the shrubbery. Their nesting seems to go all right, but when the ducklings emerge on to the lake the Lesser Black-Backed and Herring Gulls make short work of them.

About Me

I have been coming to the park for more than 60 years, and watching and feeding the birds. I am not an expert birder, but I know and love the park.
My main camera is a Pentax K-1 with a Pentax DFA 150-450mm zoom lens. At 7lb it is just light enough to carry for several hours. I also carry a Nikon Coolpix P900 for video and near shots where depth of field is required, and for very long shots where its enormous 83x zoom (equal to a 2000mm lens) is more important than a high-quality image.

This list is of all the birds, including rare visitors, that have been seen in the park since 1889. Sources include W.H. Hudson, 1898 (the naturalist in whose memory the Rima memorial was built); A.H. Macpherson, 1929; and various publications of the London Natural History Society (LNHS) from 1935 to 1993, with an appendix added by Roy Sanderson in 1995 to bring the total to 177 species. Since then it has been updated from LNHS bird reports, many of these from observations by Des McKenzie, who wrote the predecessor of this blog.